On Leading Well

Category: Productivity

  • What’s Your Failure Tolerance?

    Success, said Thomas Alva Edison, is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.

    This week at MinistryNet 2011 in Bangkok is making me more aware of this axiom. Yesterday nearly 200 participants broke into workgroups of 5-8 people. Each group was tasked with working a specific problem from an innovation or collaboration angle. It’s not easy. I visited three groups and observed lots of starting, stopping, reframing, challenging and offering. It’s a healthy process that our organization desperately needs in order to stay near the cutting edges of social media ministry.

    Janakan Arulkumarasan, CEO of Onoko, is here with us. His company writes Facebook apps. They keep the focus tight, only allowing 10 days from start to finish for a new app. Their philosophy: Just get it out there, then polish it later. Their teams create about 150 apps per year, only one of which might be popular and go to 30 or 4o million downloads. The other 149 are scrap.

    This got me thinking. Am I willing to endure that rate of innovation failure in order to achieve success? I do it in some areas of my life, for instance, when I’m learning an 8-bar guitar solo. Picking out all the notes and getting the timing just right can require dozens of practice reps until it sounds right. But sometimes in ministry I naturally feel that if I’ve prayed about something and attempt to try it, God should make it work just right the first time. That’s flawed thinking. And bad theology.

    What’s helped increase your tolerance for failure en route to success?

  • Tools Can Make the Difference

    The longer I live the more I appreciate the value of having the right tool for the job at hand.

    This morning Omar is tiling our master bathroom. In less than 90 minutes he removed our old toilet, stripped off two ancient layers of linoleum, pulled up all the baseboards and cleared away all the old glue.

    When we tackled the first two bathrooms in DIY projects it took us the better part of a day on each one to accomplish the same results.

    Omar has been doing this for 17 years. He has just a few tools, but they are the right ones. It’s amazing how quickly a job can get done when one has the right tools.

    I’ve experienced this in my hobbies of cycling and music. Pulling the bottom bracket on my Cannondale road bike or smoothing out the worn frets on my Taylor guitar would take forever without the right wrench or luthier’s fret file. Trying to do the job with the wrong tool would probably result in stripped threads or a scratched fretboard. I’ve discovered it’s worth the money to invest in the right tools. Avoiding those kinds of problems also makes it a lot easier to walk in the Spirit.

    The same is true at work. When I continually get stopped by not having the right tool or knowledge of how to use that tool, I have one of two good options. The first is to schedule some time in the calendar to become proficient in the tool (such as Excel or Twitter or a new phone’s OS). Eventually I can ignore the tool and focus on what I want to do. The second option is to support and follow a team member’s lead in letting them do what I cannot do or choose not to learn (such as our complicated financial reporting software) so we can get on with the mission.

    I guess a third option would be to continue being inefficient, frustrated, unproductive or irrelevant.

    Thanks, Omar, for the great life lesson today.

     

     

  • Steve Jobs’ Legacy: Real Artists Ship

    “Real artists ship.” — Steve Jobs (1955-2011)

    That was one of Steve Jobs’ early mantras for his team of geniuses. What did he mean? Jobs meant that it doesn’t really matter how beautiful your dreams are, how simple your lines are, or how ergonomic your next product is in your mind’s eye. Real artists ship. They produce. They deliver.

    Delivering great products will be one of Steve Jobs’ enduring legacies. Did you know that Steve delivered the Apple II computer in 1977, when he was a 22 year old college dropout? Like Michael Dell and Bill Gates (two other college dropouts who began to change the world before they reached 25), Jobs seemed to me an eccentric positive deviant whose ideas were initially resisted by the establishment. Cultural inertia tends to norm everything to average: average grades, average products, average levels of initiative. Jobs inspired and delivered, redefining “normal” for millions of people. For example, I find it totally normal to have my entire music and video collection of 5,913 items in my pocket, going everywhere I go, every day. That wasn’t true ten years ago.

    Here’s a thought in the same spirit: Real leaders lead. Real leaders make stuff happen. They don’t just daydream, strategize, plan, and cast vision. Real leaders deviate from the system. They reset their culture’s “norm” needle. They make deadlines and hit targets. Not perfectly, and not every time. But often enough to build legitimate expectations and set new standards among their followers. Things are different after they leave.

    Nehemiah was another leader who delivered. Burdened by reports of the desolation of his hometown, Jerusalem, he inspired and motivated hundreds of ordinary citizens to refortify the city’s wall and gates. He endured attacks from external foes and dissent from within. Yet “the wall was finished… in fifty-two days” (Nehemiah 6:15).

    Real artists ship. Real leaders lead.

    What is stopping your dream from shipping?